The album David Gilmour was bullied into making: “My mistake”
Following principal songwriter Roger Waters’ official split from Pink Floyd in 1985, it was clear who served as the band’s creative director and conceptual engine across their early psychedelic works. It’s their subsequent projects that put everything into perspective.
With both dropping in 1987, Waters’ Radio KAOS offered another immersive rock tale of nuclear anxiety supported by an innovative hi-tech live show that set the stage for U2’s Zoo TV extravaganza a few years later. On the other side, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour stepped behind the mic to captain A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Plagued with soggy production and soul-sapping digital washes which rob the band of their former cosmic heft, Pink Floyd’s first post-Waters album, while commercially successful, marked the sound of a band creatively floundering. The trio would return with 1994’s The Division Bell, an infinitely stronger and more confident album touching on themes of communication and boasting bangers such as ‘What Do You Want from Me’ and ‘High Hopes’. Not a patch on the classic 1970s LP run, but a respectable parting statement and closure to the Pink Floyd legacy.
20 years later, Waters had briefly regrouped with Pink Floyd for their 2005 Live 8 performance but otherwise remained bitterly acrimonious, and founding keyboardist Richard Wright died three years later. It appeared that the classic space rock band’s tenure was truly over, yet 2014’s The Endless River was dropped as the band’s final curtain, largely a collation of outtakes and offcuts during The Division Bell sessions with Wright’s synth work stitched together to make an immersive, ambient instrumental record—save its sole single ‘Louder Than Words’ sung by Gilmour.
Not even production assistance from Youth, Phil Manzanera, and old The Wall comrade Bob Ezrin can mask what’s at best an anniversary bonus disc to their 1994 effort. The Endless River‘s title is apt, traipsing through an eternal slush of new age fluff and aimless synthscapes in desperate need of some focus or conceptual anchorage to tie it all together. It’s just not interesting, and it’s no surprise that most of its material was intended for the cutting room floor.
“When we did that album, there was a thing that Andy Jackson, our engineer, had put together called ‘The Big Spliff’ — a collection of all these bits and pieces of jams that was out there on bootlegs,” Gilmour told the Los Angeles Times in 2024. “A lot of fans wanted this stuff that we’d done in that time, and we thought we’d give it to them. My mistake, I suppose, was in being bullied by the record company to have it out as a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record. It should have been clear what it was — it was never intended to be the follow-up to The Division Bell.”
Sometimes you just can’t give fans what they want. Let ‘The Big Spliff’ live on in bootlegged mythos, one last flash of mystique before letting loose Pink Floyd’s dazzling oeuvre to the ages. Perhaps when viewed as an epilogue to the band’s story, it might make more sense, but The Endless River‘s pressured production marks a finale in their catalogue that reeks of perfunctory and non-essential.
